The Hero Worship of That New Springsteen Movie Knows No Limits

Blinded by the Light should probably have been called Badlands, because it embodies the song’s key lyric: “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” The film, which was adapted by screenwriter and director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), gleefully and unironically feels like living inside a Springsteen song, complete with angry fathers, dead-end towns, young love—hell, there’s even a dying factory.

The story draws loosely from screenwriter Sarfraz Manzoor’s 2007 memoir Greetings From Bury Park, which depicted Manzoor’s transformative discovery of Springsteen’s music as a 16-year-old Pakistani Muslim living in the London suburb of Luton in late-’80s Thatcherite Britain. In the film, Manzoor has been transformed into Javed, a quietly ambitious bookworm who yearns to escape his lifeless home for the big city. Javed feels constrained by the expectations of his father, who has just been laid off from his 16-year job at the Vauxhall automobile factory. (Any of this sounding familiar, Bruce fans?)

On his first day at college, Javed bumps into Roops (Aaron Phagura), a Sikh wearing a denim jacket and a red bandana underneath his turban. A tape falls out of Roops’ Walkman. “Who’s that?” Javed asks. “The Boss.” “Whose boss?” “The boss of us all,” Roops answers, walking away smiling. Later, Roops hands over two tapes, pulling them out of each side of his denim jacket like a gunslinger, but Javed doesn’t play them until his father loses his job. Seized by the fear he’ll have to quit school and abandon his dreams of becoming a writer, he pops Born in the USA into his Sony Walkman (which he wears every waking moment, as one did in the ’80s), hears the words to “Dancing in the Dark,” and somewhere in New Jersey, an angel gets its wings.

Javed is officially converted. “It’s like Bruce knows everything I’ve ever felt!” he burbles to Roops the next day. For the rest of the film, he immerses himself in Springsteen’s music. The Boss’s songs become a sort of superpower: They push him to keep writing, to court his crush, to stand up against racist bullies, and ultimately, to stand up for himself. Those moments are the film’s high points, and the ones that will make the story appeal to filmgoers beyond the Church of Bruce.

But the film falters around its stated goal: “We want the whole world to understand the music and the words of Bruce Springsteen,” said Chadha at the afterparty of the film’s Asbury Park premiere on July 7th. Chadha (who is also a Springsteen fan) and Manzoor appealed to Springsteen to use his music in the movie, and the Boss provided both script approval and his blessing on the final cut. The result is an unprecedented 12 Springsteen songs featured in Blinded by the Light.

Turns out you can have too much of a good thing: There is so much Springsteen music in the film that it occasionally threatens to suffocate the story. There’s a lovely scene where Javed sees his crush, Eliza (Nell Williams), handing out fliers up the road. Javed puts on his headphones, presses play on “Thunder Road,” and serenades Eliza publicly, which introduces one of the film’s two Bollywood-inspired musical numbers, complete with dancing townspeople, air guitar, and an actual rose being thrown in the rain. It’s equal parts charming and cringeworthy, even for a Springsteen fan who regularly embraces the hokey and the sincere. There’s more than a few of these moments, including an elaborate dance through the streets of Luton set to “Born to Run” (I wish I were kidding). Without Springsteen’s largesse, the film would have been forced to be tighter, and the result likely would have induced less of a sugar coma.

The Bruce-fanatic inside jokes, are, admittedly, delightful. Every Springsteen fan in the world will identify with Javed when he is told that Bruce is “your dad’s music” (“Look at the calendar,” says the Boy George-looking college radio DJ when Javed and Roops ask to host a weekly Springsteen show. “It’s 1987.”). Likewise, diehards can mouth along to the “actually, it’s about the plight of the Vietnam veteran” speech that Javed gives to defend “Born in the USA” from charges of jingoism. And Javed’s father’s insistence on referring to him as “that Jewish singer” is hilarious.

But the movie feels flatter and less emotionally satisfying than anything about Bruce Springsteen has the right to be. That’s probably because Blinded by the Light skirts the depth and nuance in Springsteen’s writing in favor of the bold and bright gestures of his band. The Boss’s biggest songs are triumphant and life-affirming, yes, but Chadha’s adaptation could have used some more of the man’s rich ambivalence. Manzoor’s story was already sufficiently uplifting—and has such uncanny parallels to the world in 2019—without also making the film into The Gospel of St. Bruce.